not the greenest option, but a lot of the solid surface companies are now using products with pretty high percentages of recycled material, and look pretty good we just did our kitchen, and i couldnt find too many around here in Virginia that offered the recycled glass, let alone justify the price. granite was absolutely not an option(grew up in colorado springs, ive seen first hand what granite quarrying does to a mountain. the designer was boggled that i refused granite. i tried to explain, but here in this region, theyre about 10yrs behind the west regarding real sustainability or recycling). i didnt want the particle board/laminate countertops as theyre throw away. so we went with the corian. yeah its plasticish, it probably takes a ton of energy to make, but the transit to here was short(and put Americans to work) it can be repaired,(not many others can be), contained some industrial by product/recycled/reclaimed content, and it looked nice. install was fast and took little to no adhesives. will the next owners probably jsut throw it away? maybe. id like to hope that it would end up in someone elses kitchen though. i know laminate wont, and granite doesnt travel well. sure theres a lot of other options, but wheres it manufactured? hows it manufactured? and at the end of the day, whats it cost? i love the way granite looks, really, but i really find it less than functional, and tough to justify for me the stripping a mountain of million year old stone so my kitchen looks nice. thats prepostrous to me. nevermind what happens when it stains, or cracks? it ends up in the trash. thats wasteful. wasting some laminated/compressed paper, or particle board is one thing, but stone is something completely different. that crap cant just be grown again. apologize for the resurection of this topic

Lavender, WOW... your plan looks amazing! I am still deciding on what to put into the kitchen. I have always been drawn to clean lines but with warmth - I want the space to have some rusticity to it as well. I am hoping when we gut it that we will find the brick in good enough condition to keep it exposed. Another GW posted this picture and I just LOVE these floors. I had not considered porcelein/ceramic/stone floors because I really like the idea of something bullet proof (such as vinyl), but I dragged home a lot of samples for DH to look at and he is not thrilled about the idea of putting so much into the kitchen and then using vinyl on the floors. He loves this inspiration pic of the floors too so this is our new direction: This is what I am considering for the main kitchen for cabinetry - It would be a cove inset where the frame is 5/4 and the doors are 4/4 so the doors/drawers are recessed in - I will have the cabinets combined wherever possible so that there won't be any seams. I will also eliminate the rails between doors and drawers so that I can have extra space inside the cabinets - in other words, there will be a frame on the outside of the doors and drawers but no frame between them. The wood is called cerused oak, also known as limed oak... I saw a sample of it and fell for it (DH did too). It has sort of a worn old french look to it but also what I would consider an understated elegance. For the butler's pantry, I am thinking of something painted that will pick up on what happens in the kitchen. If I have any glass door cabinets in the kitchen, I will have the interiors of the cabinets painted with the same color as the butler's pantry cabinets. Ignore, the doorstyle, but I like this color that the cabinet company offers - it is called farm fresh: I want the butler's pantry to be a transition from the kitchen to the rest of the house. So the butler's pantry will be just a little bit more dressy than the kitchen. The kitchen will have what I would consider a "pro style" look to it but warm, homey, clean lines. I think what will tie the two spaces together will be doorstyle, flooring, and countertops. The floors in the rest of the house are a honey oak (which is not my favorite so I don't want to bring that in at all -- this is why I think painted cabinets in the butler's pantry will ease the transition of the honey oak floors in the rest of the house and the cerused oak cabinets in the kitchen). For the peninsula I am considering frameless cabinetry in a different doorstyle and having panels on the side and back of the cabinet that match this doorstyle but in the same cerused oak finish as on the other cabinet. Here is the doorstyle: I LOVE the arctic pear light fixture by Ochre but I highly doubt I can afford it, but I would like something decorative along these lines somewhere in either the kitchen, over the peninsula, over the sink in the butler's pantry or over the dining room table. It comes in several different sizes - obviously i wouldn't need anything as big as this but either way not sure it will make a difference as it is likely out of the budget My dining room looks like this... it is just on the other side of the butler's pantry and I am working toward having a cohesion between all the rooms - I like a lot of color - just love my orange chairs (they are from the 1940's and I recently had them reupholstered). I will paint the upper part of the dining room walls but will wait until after the kitchen is done so that I can tie in colors, etc. I am sure I have totally bored you by now, but thanks for looking!!

These are my pics of my countertops placed Friday June 22, 2018. I cried looking at these seams. It looks so cheap. Fabricator explains that's the way it comes. I explained that I shouldn't be able to see the seams so clearly. It looks so unprofessional. They ended up taking them back to their warehouse. In hopes they say if it is quality control will try and fix it just to make it look better. Otherwise I will have to pay an additional fee for them to come out again to install. I just don't know what to do and if still looks the same. This is the first time I've replaced my counters in 24 years. I don't and can't live with it. looking at this for another 24 years. It looks so cheap and it really was not it's a lot of money to me. I hope fingers crossed that they will fix this problem. They never told me that there would be such seams. I thought the edges were done by a machine and it would be all one piece. I have read up on this and now understand there are seams. But now I do know that they should not look like this. If they are good fabricator you shouldn't be able to see them so clearly. I will find out next week what happens.

Here are a some pics and my dilemma. Keep in mind this is my old fridge...new one comes today! Here is how we ended up with this: I have never had an enclosed fridge so didn't think about the peninsula dying into panels or how deep panels were going to be. I "semi" designed the new footprint and took it to Lowe's where the KD took over. (yes---I know......) Bought Schuler plywood with maple fronts cabinets. Although the kitchen designer had the model number of the fridge we were buying, which is a full-size, she designed the kitchen with 24" deep panels. She knew I was trying to have the look of an enclosed fridge. Being that I've never had an enclosed fridge, it was something I just didn't think of until the install started. Evidently she put a counter-depth in the design program because the elevation sketches she gave me showed an enclosed fridge. "Luckily" the panels actually came in wrong and were cut at only 23" for some strange reason and the installer caught it right away when looking over everything. Otherwise he probably would have installed them and I would be stuck. So called Lowe's to reorder the panels and somehow in all this it suddenly dawned on me that a full size fridge was going to be deeper and require deeper panels. I thought "no problem! Yay I can order them at 30!" By this time the KD had quit her job due to the pandemic. The other KD didn't know what was going on so we called in the Schuler rep. She was the one who immediately told me that those 30" panels would be sticking out in front of the peninsula. She asked if we could move the peninsula forward since the other side is an overhang for seating, but we couldn't since it would bottleneck the entrance into the kitchen down to under 36" and getting rid of an existing bottleneck was one of the reasons for the re-design to start with. So we had a dilemma. We cannot go down to a counter depth fridge which was the other option. What I decided was to split the difference and order 27" refrigerator panels. The fridge without doors is 29.5" so I will have about 3" of the side of the fridge sticking out which I don't like, but while I want my kitchen to look beautiful, I value the functionality too. The old fridge that you see in the pic sticks out a total of 32" The new fridge will stick out 34 with doors but without handles (4.5" of that is doors that would stick out anyway) Here's the really complicated part....we will be installing decorative panels on the end of the fridge as we have them on all the cabinets. This is how you enter the kitchen and I don't want that big blank space there next to the peninsula. The panels should be installed with just 1/4" reveal. I posted a photo below of how the panels look that are already installed on the side of the pantry that adjoins to a 17" high window seat. Luckily those face the opposite way from the fridge panels so you will never see both at the same time. I also posted photos of us holding up panels on the side of the fridge (they are NOT the right size panels...we have to order those still---we just used these to look at the right edge as to how wide to make the panels.) Also keep in mind we can remove the quartz backsplash piece if that would look better. That was not originally planned...the panels were going to sit directly on top of the countertop. So do we order the panels with just the 1/4" reveal to match the panels in the rest of the kitchen? Or, as the Schuler rep recommended, order the panels so they are the same width with the countertop, leaving about 1 3/4" reveal on the right side, but then your eye follows the countertop all the way up. I asked the countertop templater guy if I should just lengthen the overhang on the kitchen side of the peninsula to 2.5" to bring it out to within 1/4" of the fridge panel but he said no....I'm now thinking I should have insisted on it. Especially since we have full overlay cabinets that already make the overlay look very small since the 1.5" planned overhang is measured from the box, not the front of the drawers. Note how small the overhang looks to the drawers. And then of course, they had templated for a 1.5" overhang and I only got 1.25" UGH! Every quarter inch there would have made the reveal on the side of the fridge less. Suggestions appreciated! I'm hoping that I will eventually make peace in my mind with this issue and won't notice it but it is driving me crazy right now. I think of all the things that screwed up just because of this one error by the KD that I didn't catch and I am beating myself up for it!